Quick Tips to Making Sure Your Blog is Secure

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If you’re looking to create a blog—whether for commercial or personal use—it’s never been easier; there are plenty of excellent guides these days that will help you through all the nitty-gritty details. But even though these guides are guaranteed to help you out with the basics, most new bloggers don’t realize that starting a blog comes with its own set of security risks, which include everything from domain hijacking to viruses to identity theft and more. Here are some quick reminders:

Use a Reliable CMS

There are plenty of content management systems that are designed to help everyone from the novice web-designer to the advanced programmer with creating a website, but some CMSs are more legitimate than others. Rather than grabbing the first CMS you find, read through reviews, and make sure you’re choosing the best platform for the blog that you plan to create. You’ll make things a lot easier on yourself if you do! WordPress is one of the most popular ones, but you have other options as well.

Create a Strong Username and Password

The first thing you’ll need to do is come up with a username and password combination that will be difficult to hack. This means getting rid of that generic “Admin” username, as well as coming up with a password that contains uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols—all completely at random. If you’re like most people, you might find that a truly secure password is difficult to remember, but that’s what password managers is for.

Search for Available Security Plugins

If you’re using WordPress (or many other popular CMSs), you should search out what security pluginsare available to protect your site. As with anti-virus software on your computer, these programs are designed to search your website for viruses and provide solutions for any strange code that is included in your themes and in other plugins. The thing is, especially if you’re using free themes and plugins, there could be a few lines of code that compromise your site by either spying on you and your blog visitors or that infect you all with malware. Obviously, this isn’t something you want for your blog, so be prepared to squash out bugs as soon as possible.

Keep Everything Updated

A large part of why programs, themes and plugins are updated so frequently is to make sure you’re protected against the latest security hazards. See, advances are being made every day that compromise your online security, and thus more changes need to be made to make sure your identity and personal information are kept safe. Even if it’s a minor inconvenience, install updates as soon as possible, or you could be faced with a bigger inconvenience later!

Learn about Safe Network Practices

Unfortunately, not all networks are as convenient as they might seem. You could find yourself accidentally connecting to a malevolent hotspot or the victim of a vicious hacker on a public network.

Enter the VPN, which will safeguard the information (including passwords) that your computer sends to the websites that you access. You’ll want a strong one so that you can make sure you’re not providing hackers with an open port to your computer where they can dock malware, spyware and more. There are plenty of other problems with public WiFi networks too, so make sure you’re up-to-date with the potential pitfalls.

Check Back Often

One of the things that I can’t stress enough is that if you want to protect your blog, you really need to be vigilant about it. Don’t wait for your domain host, CMS, friends or anyone else to let you know you’ve been hacked. Instead, be proactive, and check it all out for yourself, as often as you can. You might find that you’re sometimes wasting your time, but it’s better to waste time now than to have to spend time later trying to fix something that’s gone wrong—especially since a lot of people whose domain names are hacked never manage to recover them!

Whether you’re trying to become one of the strongest writers for the year or just trying to keep in touch with family members who live in a different area from you, you’ll find that setting up a blog is pretty easy, but keeping that blog from being corrupted is something that you need to keep from, especially if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into designing it.

Are there any other practices that you’ve adopted? Tell us in the comments!